Highlights of the ICANNWatch Archive
(June 1999 - March 2001)

Oh yeah, so I went to Global's website to point you folks to a story, a transcript, or some streaming video if we're lucky (Global Vancouver, which used to be called BCTV, but now some other station is called that, ohhh I'm getting confused again, was the world's first TV station to livestream its newscasts online).

So anyway, global isn't at global.ca or at global.com, it's at Canada.com (not canada.ca, that's reserved by CIRA, the .ca administrator), so if you want to learn about Global you go to Canada. I feel more confusion coming on. OTOH if you want to learn about Canada I wouldn't recommend going to Global because they're a mouthpiece for the scandal plagued federal government, but you could try canada.info (registered to the Communications Department of the Goverment of Canada) except it doesn't communicate.

Hmmm, how about canada.biz? Ya, that sorta works. It is presently owned by Stephen Rumney of England, who is more well known for grabbing many of the 'best' .info names in Sunrise using false trademark data. He later kept some of these through the Afilias WIPO challenge process, and lost others, sometimes to others who had trademarks, sometimes to others who also had no trademarks. And he even seems to have lost games.info and got it back. Ohhh, I'm confused again.

Molson Brewery has a long-running ad campaign based on patriotism which features the slogan I am Canadian, so they also have an iam.ca site, powered by Canada.com. Molson is also, absurdly, the registrant for iam.info, which loses something in the translation. And Molson apparently isn't the registrant of either canadian.ca or canadien.ca, the latter being the French spelling (Canada is officially bilingual English/French). Canadien.* is also registered in .com .net .org .info .biz, only the latter of which is registered to someone in Canada, and neither it nor any of the others are registered to Molson. BTW, canada.us and canadian.us are both registered to the same individual in Florida. OTOH some apparent Canadian seems to have an interest in Florida. The osceolasheriff.org site at time of writing now just points to domainquest's front page without porn. The sheriff can now be found at osceolasheriff.com, which is only somewhat confusing. I suspect this story may be a harbinger of more to come from the dropjacker crowd.

Back to Canada, which is to say Global, I wasn't able to find any streaming video, though they do cover the story here. The television version said the ruling will take some weeks to come down. Molson came across as an over-reaching corporate bully so they've probably already lost much more than they can gain, no matter the ruling. I don't know of any other court cases regarding UDRP decisions outside the US. It will be interesting to see if Canadian law can cut through the confusion. -g

I found the Marutionline.com case at UDRPLaw.net's excellent list of court cases regarding the UDRP, but could not find there or elsewhere any newer information than that the Delhi court had issued a stay of four months well over a year ago. The respondent is still listed as the registrant in the WHOIS, and the name doesn't resolve.

Thx. for the references. Will keep you posted. -g

A number of sites do this, Yahoo for example, and in that case if I try to sign up for an email address it wants to give me @yahoo.ca even if I want @yahoo.com. This practice is taking some power away from the end user to choose what they access online based on national boundaries, and isn't a trend I particularily care for. In the above examples it is just search engines trying to be helpful and relevant and even that causes problems. How do I know if I give a link that others will receive the content I intended? But as was suggested in the yahoo.fr case, it could be used to control content flow across national boundaries.

This does have one perhaps unintended side-effect. I used to type google.com to get to google.ca, but it's easier to type google.ca so that's what I now use. This means that Google and other highly used sites are probably educating Canadians on the existence and use of their ccTLD, and this may also be true in some other countries. I suspect an analysis of ccTLDs like .ca, .de (Germany), .uk (United Kingdom, .jp (Japan), .au (Australia), etc. would find that a greater percentage of addresses are in actual use than in gTLDs, that is, less speculation and cybersquatting, less defensive registrations. With dropjackers picking up expired names and pointing them elsewhere, and with the WLS about to turn this into a major industry for .com and .net, I expect websurfers will receive ever-increasing lessons that the use of domain names to find things isn't very accurate, and that .com and .net are generally worse that country codes (at least those of countries like the above). Not only is the DNS not very accurate, in the case of dropjackers serving up mousetrapping multiple pop-up pr0n sites, it can be downright annoying. This could transfer some power from ICANN to the ccTLDs, if ICANN and the GAC haven't taken them over.

I also think websurfers will increasingly learn that using Google is preferable to using the DNS if one is unsure of one's destination. This would put Google in a powerful position that could be misused. -g